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Owner of PageF30.com.
Translator of Demian by Hermann Hesse into English - an interlinear translation for German students and those who want to see the original text.
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/mithradates
Fluent in Japanese, Korean. Proficient in Mandarin, Turkish, German, French, Portuguese, others.

Friday, July 10, 2009

Hi - if you're here from a Twitter update, check the bottom of the post.

Yesterday's demonstrations were hugely significant for the movement against the coup d'état government and towards a legitimate government in Iran as this was the first real successful day of demonstration since the crackdowns began on the 20th, when it seemed for a while that all dissent might be quashed and that things might return to "normal", whatever that is. As yesterday proved, the people of Iran aren't interested in taking this sitting down and also seem to have greater numbers than the government expected - after all, 18 Tir was the 10th anniversary of some well-known protests and it was obvious beforehand that there would be demonstrations.

It also resulted in the return of #Iranelection to a position of prominence on Twitter. For the past week or so it had been weakening and fell off the top ten a number of times but returned to almost the very top yesterday and is still on the list of trending topics right now.

U2 is continuing to go with the Iran-based theme for Sunday Bloody Sunday:

Interesting account here from a journalist that was arrested but since released. There seems to be a special standard of treatment for foreign journalists who are very easily capable of spreading word of any mistreatment upon release.

Allaho Akbar and marg bar diktator chants from last night after the demonstrations.

Here's an analysis on the situation that concludes that Iran will never be the same again and that the government has vastly underestimated the will of its people, similar to the first paragraph of this post.

A link has just been submitted to Balatarin here, leading to a blog post here with a video that apparently has guards in Iran speaking Arabic. I don't know any Arabic though so I'll have to wait for someone else to confirm that.

DailyKos has a thread here that made it to the top of the recommended diaries and thus has a few hundred comments as well. It's mostly photos of the demonstrations yesterday.

Deutsche Welle in Persian has an article on an interview by Shirin Ebadi on the current situation, where she says the regime in Iran is getting more and more violent by the day.

You can see it automatically translated here, but note that where it says "Khshntr Ruzbeh Day" what it's supposed to say is "more violent by the day" (روز به روز خشن‌تر می‌شود). Nevertheless the automatic translation is good enough to get an idea of what she said.